Navigating a merger: AI-Powered mass contract review for MSIG Europe

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MSIG Europe SE is part of the Japanese MS&AD Group, one of the world's largest insurance groups. They provide commercial and industrial risk coverage across Europe from their European headquarters in Brussels as well as from offices in several other European countries.

When former MSIG Insurance Europe AG (MSIGEU) announced a merger with their sister company MS Amlin Insurance SE to form the new MSIG Europe SE, their legal team faced exactly the kind of challenge that traditional manual review struggles to handle: a large volume of contracts, multiple languages, and a tight deadline. They needed to identify which agreements contained change of control clauses, and understand the real-world consequences of each one, before the merger took effect.

MSIG Senior Legal Counsel Georg Berten brought in Ask Q to deliver that review quickly and reliably.

The Challenge

Under the merger, all existing MSIGEU contracts would transfer to MS Amlin Insurance as-is. The main risk was whether any of those contracts included change of control clauses: clauses that can give a counterparty the right to terminate, or even cause a contract to expire automatically, when ownership changes hands.

MSIGEU had already done internal triage and narrowed the scope to around 50 contracts. But the portfolio spanned multiple languages – English, Dutch, French, German, and Italian – and the merger timeline left no room for a slow, document-by-document review. What they needed was rapid visibility across the full portfolio, with clear and reliable answers.

Our Approach

This is precisely where Ask Q's large scale review approach comes in. Rather than working through the contracts sequentially, we uploaded all 50 documents into a legal AI tool we are familiar with and used structured prompting to extract the relevant information consistently across the entire portfolio in one go.

The AI pulled out the key data points for each contract:

Document and contract names
Counterparties and MSIG entities involved
Whether a change of control clause was present
The language of the clause
A summary of the reasoning and potential consequences

From there, Ask Q's legal consultants reviewed and validated the AI output for all contracts in English, Dutch, and French, checking accuracy, correcting where needed, and translating legal language into plain English so the business impact was immediately clear. For contracts in other languages, Ask Q's legal consultants relied on the tool’s built-in translation features to verify content where necessary.

Human expertise was embedded throughout: from designing the prompts, to validating every output, to making sure the final deliverable was decision-ready.

What MSIG received

The deliverable was a structured Excel overview of all 50 contracts, a clean, tabular format that gave MSIG's team an immediate portfolio-level view without having to open a single source document.

Each contract was colour-coded using a simple traffic-light system:

Green: no change of control clause found
Orange: clause present, but unlikely to be triggered by this merger
Red: clause present with potential real-world impact

For every relevant contract, we included a short plain-language explanation of what the clause meant in practice, particularly whether it allowed termination or could lead to automatic expiry.

Out of all 50 contracts, only three contained a change of control clause with potential consequences for the merger.

Working with Ask Q gave us confidence that the review would be done both quickly and thoroughly. Their team already had hands-on experience with this type of AI-supported contract review and knew exactly how to structure the prompts and validate the output to deliver reliable results.

Georg Berten

Senior Legal Counsel, MSIG Europe SE

Impact

The review was completed within the agreed timeframe, giving MSIG a clear and structured overview before the merger took effect. What could have been a slow, resource-heavy exercise was delivered quickly, in a format the team could act on immediately.

For MSIG, the value wasn't just speed. It was the confidence that came from knowing their contractual position across the full portfolio, with nothing missed and every finding validated by a legal expert.

The project is a clear example of what large scale review can deliver: rapid visibility, clear risk identification, and reliable outputs, even under tight timelines and across complex, multilingual document sets. Not AI instead of lawyers. AI and lawyers, working the way they should.

By combining AI with legal review, we were able to quickly analyse all contracts and highlight the key clauses relevant to the merger. This gave MSIG a clear and fast overview of their contractual position and any risks. The review was much faster, without losing legal accuracy or quality, so the team could make confident decisions.